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About Michael J. Miller

Miller, who was editor-in-chief of PC Magazine from 1991 to 2005, authors this blog for PC Magazine to share his thoughts on PC-related products. No investment advice is offered in this blog. All duties are disclaimed. Miller works separately for a private investment firm which may at any time invest in companies whose products are discussed in this blog, and no disclosure of securities transactions will be made.

DEMO: Security Shines Among Mobile Apps

This morning at Demo, mobile applications took the spotlight and new entrants ranged in categories from security to application-building to games. While the market is very crowded and the competition is fierce, I'll share with you some apps that I think seem the most promising.

Of the many categories presented, I found security to be the most interesting:

Toopher addresses the mobile security market by showing on your phone when someone is trying to log into a website. You can then authorize or prohibit the log-in and set it to automatically authenticate if you're in a particular location. This looks like a reasonable alternative to the one-time password process some sites have implemented and in the demonstration, the company put a number of token key fobs into a blender. Of course, its success will depend on whether websites implement the technology, it looked good in a quick demo.

TrustGo Mobile showed a new antivirus and security solution. It discussed how some applications track data you don't know and explained that its software looks not only for malicious apps, but also at the permissions that applications ask for. It has a basic security scanner that can analyze the apps on your phone and the company has looked at more than 200 mobile markets and is tracking 6,700 malicious apps. More importantly, 17 percent of all of the apps the company has scanned are "malicious," collecting information you may not want them to. Other features include secure Web browsing, data backup in the cloud, and a system manager. It also has a "safe application finder" that lists which download sites have safe and unsafe versions of particular apps.

A couple of programs were focused on building apps:

UppSite is a quick and easy way to convert a website into an application. It will create both native apps for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone, as well as mobile Web-based apps. The basic service is free, but there is also a paid version. It's interesting that it works across platforms, but it was hard to tell from the demo how it compared with competing solutions.

iGenApps showed a different kind of app builder—one designed to let you create an app directly from your mobile phone. You can create an icon and splash screen by using the camera; choose from multiple menu styles; place your app into multiple categories; integrate Facebook and Twitter; and add contact information. The concept here is to build apps that require no programming, which appears to mean just putting content (text and pictures) into an application. iGen is available for the iOS platform, with Android support coming shortly. It looks about as simple as texting.

Two programs focused on 3D or panoramic models:

Arqball has a visualization tool called Arqball Spin, which allows users to see 3D products. A user can put a product on a rotating turntable and the app takes photos and creates a 3D representation, or "spins." Users can easily label particular parts of the representation and there is currently an iPad application that shows these spins. It looked fun, but would seem to make more sense as a feature rather than a stand-alone app.

TourWrist is a way of capturing and viewing 3D experiences. As near as I can tell, you can capture a 3D panorama from your smartphone or tablet and then move around in the environment as you move the tablet around. It can live on the TourWrist site or can be embedded in other sites, including Facebook. The company offers tools for editing the panoramas. The demonstration said it is like a holodeck or Twitter for experiences, which seems too much of a stretch for me, but it is very neat.

I think the 3D apps like Arqball could make sense for professionals, but I wonder about building consumer markets for these.

In addition, there were a number of general consumer apps:

Tilt World is a fun little iOS app in which a frog named Flip eats dandelion seeds as part of a way to raise money for WeForest, which is hoping to plant real trees in Madagascar. The company pitched the notion of using games as a way to help "build a better world," which is certainly a good concept, but has been hard to make successful.

Edamam offers universal recipe search for iOS and Android, which reduces the time it takes to find a recipe. Type in the kind of food you want and the app pulls in recipes and pictures of food from many online sources. You can also set specific dietary requirements and find things such as nutritional information, so you can compare recipes. It also creates a shopping list that you can use at the grocery store.

Fribi has a social marketplace so people can give away or swap items they aren't using any more. Users can connect their social networks (Facebook now, and Twitter soon) or follow individual users, and share individual items publicly or privately. All the transactions are done within the app and no contact information is exchanged until the user approves an individual transaction. It also has a "perks" section with special discounts. This is in the App Store now and will be out for Android next month. It looks neat and easy to use, but will need critical mass to be really useful and compete with popular sites like Craigslist.

Dabble from Daemonic Labs is a location-based photo journal. Effectively, you can create an electronic postcard and leave it in a location. Later, people who visit the same location can discover the "postcards" and see what you thought about the space. The concept here is that location, not time, should be the major organizing context. Its iPhone app lets you take images, immediately post them to locations, and share them with your friends. It's fun, but I'm unsure I'd really use a separate service for this.

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